We Humans are Subordinate Worms

In his three volume sociological epic, The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann of London's LSE introduces the notion of "caging."

Presumably this notion owes something to Max Weber's famous "iron cage." Mann uses the notion in discussing the rise of alluvial agriculture in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. His idea is that the agriculturalists doing alluvial agriculture were not able to get up and walk away from their rulers. They needed the political infrastructure that protected them and their agricultural surplus from raiders and the economic infrastructure of irrigation that gave them their bountiful harvest. So they were stuck.

In our day we like to talk about freedom from the hierarchical society of the agricultural age. But, really, how much freedom do we really enjoy? Are we not "caged" even more than the early agriculturalists, not to mention the feudal peasants that we like to marginalize.

At least the agriculturalists could live for months on their own. They had stored grain; they had domestic animals for milk and meat; they had varied skills to keep life going.

But we moderns are completely helpless. We depend on electricity for everything from heat to cooking; rare is the family that has a stack of wood out in back. We depend on supermarkets to deliver food to us every day; rare is the family that has stored any food against disaster. And we work for the Man, not as peasants did, at some distance from the local lord, but directly, every day, as a subordinate employee in a small business, a large corporation, or a monster government bureaucracy.

We talk a pretty good line about freedom, if we are conservatives and libertarians, and emancipation and liberation if we are liberals and lefties, but in practice we subordinate ourselves to the system, and we seem to like it.

I'm talking about "subordination" as defined by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. I've discussed Simmel and subordination here, here, and here.

Oh we complain about subordination. We grumble that "they" haven't fixed the pothole in our street, or that "they" have screwed up the economy. We complain about our lousy boss at work. But we are far too comfortable in our subordinate cage to actually do anything about it.

I like to talk and write about humans as social animals, as organisms that thrive through cooperation. But maybe that's mostly fantasy. The reality is that social animals are subordinate animals; they live by subordinating themselves to a ruler: the alpha male.  In humans this alpha male is the president, the village "big man," or the family patriarch. Or, more recently, the feminist scold.

So let's do a "reset." Let's stipulate that the conservative-libertarian idea of freedom is a pipe-dream; let's stipulate that the lefty ideas about solidarity and liberation are nonsense. In reality, people want to find a community to which they can subordinate themselves in security and comfort.

Then the question becomes: choose your poison. Do you want to subordinate yourself to the market system, to prices, to supervisors, to customers, to CEOs? Or do you want to subordinate yourself to politicians, bureaucrats, activists, and precinct captains?

Maybe, then, the point of politics is to regulate the terms of subordination. What rights has the market or your boss over you? And what rights does the politician, the expert, the activist have to tax your and push you around?

Not quite as exciting as freedom and liberation.

Liberals Really are the Best People, Says NYT

If you were planning the Sunday New York Times for the first Sunday in the New Year, what better than a piece from Richard Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class?

Richard Florida is a member of that elite corps of university professors that sat down and wrote a non-fiction bestseller. You can see why Florida has hit the jackpot. His thesis in Creative Class is that "millions of Americans are beginning to work and live" like artists and scientists, as creative people, members of the 38 million strong "Creative Class." These creative people are coming together in "ideopolises" like Washington DC, Raleigh-Durham, Boston, and Austin, where the Creative Class represents over 35% of the workforce.

This sort of talk is very seductive to liberals, because ever since the Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century, they have believed in the god of creativity rather than the God of Abraham. In my writing I talk about responsible individualism, which arises from trade and the exchange economy in the city. That is where the ordinary middle class live. But there is also expressive individualism, the cult of creativity, which really gets started in the 19th century. Here is how I describe the growth of the creative culture in "The Bonds of Faith."

Charles Taylor in A Secular Age sees these three narratives — Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Marxism — combining to form a “nova effect,” an explosion of secularity that began with “an exclusive alternative to Christian faith” in the 18th century.  The initial explosion was followed by diversification in the 19th century, extending to the Nietzschean break with the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit. Finally in the last 50 years the nova has exploded to reach beneath elites to whole societies and includes “a generalised culture of 'authenticity', or expressive individualism,” of doing your own thing.

And that is what educated twentysomethings think they are doing when they move to urban hot-spots and wear artistical black.

So the job of Richard Florida in last Sunday's New York Times is to tie creativity and blue states and all good things together, and show that the extractive economy of the red states is a kind of parasite on the creative output of the Creative Class in the blue states.

Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois, whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs.

But this is not good. According to Florida, the reddification of politics last November means that "America's prosperity is in jeopardy." The problem is that

Blue state knowledge economies are also extremely expensive to operate. Their innovative edge turns on a high-cost infrastructure of research universities and knowledge institutions — a portion of which demand public subsidy. Their size and density require expensive subway and transit systems to move people around. Blue state cities like New York and San Francisco are booming, but they are hampered by potholes and crumbling infrastructure, troubled public school systems, growing inequality and housing unaffordability, and entrenched poor populations, all of which mean higher public costs and higher tax burdens.

You see, blue states "are pioneering the new economic order that will determine our future — one that turns on innovation and knowledge rather than the raw production of goods." Meanwhile "red states spend less per capita on education, infrastructure and social welfare than their blue state counterparts" and are content to poach free stuff from the blue state knowledge economy.

The idea that the red states can enjoy the benefits provided by the blue states without helping to pay for them (and while poaching their industries with the promise of low taxes and regulations) is as irresponsible and destructive of our national future as it is hypocritical.

You can see that Richard Florida is a Gruberist. He believes that educated experts should design and implement administrative systems to deliver cities where we can incubate "innovation and knowledge." And the rest of us should be made to pay for it.

You could say that the opposite is true. You could say that the blue states represent the end stage of a one-size-fits-all industrialism that is presently crashing and burning, as in Detroit. You could say that in a world where you can deliver tablets to kids in a village in Ethiopia and have them figure out the ABC song in two weeks and how to hack the camera within six months that there is no need for expensive blue states with their expensive subsidized lifetime employment for professors and administrators. Because we are all creative now.

But that's not the future that Creative Class booster Richard Florida sees.

As long as the highly gerrymandered red states can keep on delivering the economic goods to their voters, concerted federal action on transportation, infrastructure, sustainability, education, a rational immigration policy and a strengthened social safety net will remain out of reach. These are investments that the future prosperity of the nation, in red states and blue states alike, requires.

It's comical really. Florida is telling us that the creative future, which I would interpret means relying on "emergence" and what George Gilder calls "surprise," depends on a bureaucratic system, the system of government programs to deliver transportation, infrastructure, and the rest of the liberal agenda.

Maybe he's right. But I doubt it. I suspect that we are far more likely to see a period of "creative destruction" in the blue states that a bureaucratic renaissance paid for by new taxes on the red states.

But you have to say: Richard Florida delivers what the educated lady readers of the New York Times want to read. Good for him.

There is No Such Thing as "Peaceful Protest"

Our liberal friends have a little problem. Their political strategy of leading the lower orders forces them to condone the normal political tactic of the lower orders: the street riot.

There is nothing shameful in this; humans have since the dawn of time settled their differences by war. But our liberal friends live under the conceit that they are different. They believe in peace and justice. Unlike the racists, sexists, homophobes, patriarchs and warmongers.

It is, of course, merely comical that racist agitators like Reverend Al Sharpton have reversed this political catchphrase about peace and justice into the direct threat of "no justice, no peace."

But politics in the modern era must deal with the idea that violence is scandalous. We moderns think that we ought to be able to settle our differences without violence. But many people that think this also think that politics is the way to create social peace.

In fact, the best way to understand politics is that it is civil war by other means. It is a couple of notches down from the violence of civil war, and as such deals in threats of violence rather than actual violence. The whole game of politics becomes a series of sham fights: the battle of elections; the battle of public opinion; the battle of legislation.

Sensible people understand that it is best to soft-pedal the confrontational aspects of politics. That is why sensible politicians declare peace and amity after an election: we are all Americans now, they say. That is why sensible politicians attempt only to pass legislation that can command a bipartisan majority. That way we can all attest to the fiction that "we all agree" that the government should spend money (forcibly removed from working Americans) to fund Social Security or Medicare.

But politics is always warped by the fact that the people that go into politics are people that like to fight. They like a good old political dust-up; they want to dominate and humiliate the other side. But they are hobbled by the fact that most people don't like the disturbance to social peace that politics creates. So they must lie about it.

That is why our lefty friends have created euphemisms for the street violence for which they hanker. What were once called riots became marches, then demonstrations, and now peaceful protest. What were once called political agitators are now called community organizers. It is all a lie. The whole point of all politics is to rally your side to fight for victory and demoralize the other side into giving up, preferably without a fight.

There is nothing remarkable in this. It is encoded in the military philosophy of the Chinese Sun Tzu. Rule One was that the best way to win a war was without a fight by persuading the other side to give up without a war.

That is the purpose of the "peaceful protest" or the demonstration. It is a show of force designed to persuade the government or other authority to give in to the "non-negotiable" demands of the protesters without a fight.

But the point is that the "peaceful protest" is still an act of war. It is designed to intimidate and to cause the government to change its policy.

Of course, in many ways the "peaceful protest" is more efficacious as a war strategy than actual violence. The resort to actual riots and destruction of property in the aftermath of the Ferguson shooting and the Staten Island death have demonstrated this. The riots and threats to police have tended to frighten people and cause them to look to the government and the police to protect them from looters and rioters. And the actual killing of two New York City policemen makes a mockery of the conceits of "peaceful protest" and reveal the aggressive political philosophy of social warfare that the pseudo-peaceful catchphrases are intended to conceal.

Conservatives recognize that all politics is war. We look past the shameful conceits of liberal politics to a post-welfare state society in which politics plays a much smaller role. We reject the idea, after two centuries in which the ordinary person has gone from a daily income of $3 to $100, that there remain fundamental inequalities and injustices that only government spending can redeem. We say that the incidence of force is way too high when government is spending (i.e., seizing) 35 percent of the national product to hand out to its supporters. We say that individuals, combined into voluntary associations, could and should be doing the heavy lifting of caring for and educating the poor. We say that the market does the best job of selecting the best products for the best price, policed by the developed law of commerce and fraud not prescriptive government regulations.

But today in 2015 it is clear, when you talk to ordinary people, that most of us believe that the heavy hand of force is necessary to secure justice for people in the day-to-day life of working and consuming. People do not seem to believe that good, diligent workers are highly prized by good, honest employers. They do not understand that every good, decent, producer of goods and services toils daily to deliver the best that money can buy to the consumer, knowing that anything less leads to failure and bankruptcy.

And worst of all, people do not seem to understand that the more power you give to government to smite its foes, the more power you give to government to control you, especially when the "other guys" get into power.

But let us start by calling things by their right names. There is no such thing as "peaceful protest." It conceals more than it reveals, and it is a recipe for social breakdown and strife.

The Dirty Secret About Privilege in America

Our liberal friends are full of the notion of privilege: male privilege, white privilege, check your privilege. It's so annoying.

But what can we do about it?

Let's start with the facts. In 2015, in the good old USA, there is only one kind of privilege. It is liberal privilege.

Now privilege, according to Google is:

a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

It says it all. The only special rights, advantages, or immunities granted in America today are those licensed and distributed by the liberal ruling class to themselves and to their little darlings.

Let's start with the Scalise case. Here we have a congressman who may or may not have spoken once to the white racist David Duke's organization twelve years ago as he was rustling up support for a tax cut in the Louisiana state legislature. For that monstrous racist act, apparently, he should be relieved of his position as Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.

Really? This chap spoke once to a racist organization, maybe, by accident, twelve years ago? What about President Obama, who attended the church of a racist black minister for years. Who receives the notorious black racist and race-baiter Reverend Al Sharpton in the Oval Office? Talk about special rights and immunities.

Then there's the UVA rape case. Here we have a whole liberal movement based upon a lie, that one in five college women experience sexual assault during their time in college. But now the Bureau of Justice Statistics has a study showing the rate is more like 0.03 in five. Meanwhile we have the federal government trying to ram down new procedures in universities that make a mockery of due process. And the president of the University of Virginia feels justified in shutting down the social activities of all fraternities and sororities on the strength of a clickbait article in Rolling Stone. There's privilege for you. Liberal college president takes extra-judicial action with no repercussion. Liberal students vandalize fraternity house with no repercussion. Various liberal activist groups propose ignoring the evidence in favor of the narrative. That's what I call a special advantage.

In America in 2015 if you are a non-liberal you'd better watch your mouth. And if you want to stage a "peaceful protest" you'd better get all your parade permits and insurance in order. If you are a liberal or a liberal little darling, then you can say and do anything you want. Because social justice.

Look, this isn't a perfect world. Maybe there are un-corrected cases of white privilege and male privilege out there. But let's not ignore the elephant in the room. It's liberal privilege. Liberals are America's ruling class and they take advantage of it every day in every way.

So if somebody tasks you with checking your privilege, tell them to check their liberal privilege first. And a month later when they've completed a rather long and onerous task, then agree to talk about the other tiny and inconsequential privileges that are still hiding in the odd corner in America.

We all know what is going on here. It started with Karl Marx in the 1840s. Oh no, he cried! The working class is being horribly exploited by the bourgeoisie. So we need a government with the power to take it to the bourgeoisie before it reduces the working class to "immiseration."

It's been the same on every issue from the left ever since. Oh no! There's exploitation, there's privilege, there's discrimination, there's injustice! So we must give the government more power.

And what kind of power does the left want government to have? Why it wants the power to discriminate, to declare war on someone and teach them a lesson.

What are you talking about liberals? The only privilege in America today is liberal privilege. The only problem in America today is liberals.

And why is that? It's because the only people with real political power in America today is liberals. And really, without political power backing you up, privilege is a dead letter.

Explaining the Modern World

We moderns think that our modern world is different. We all agree on that. But we disagree on just about everything else. So we all write narratives to explain why our world is different and what this difference means.

The three most authoritative narratives are probably the Enlightenment narrative, the Romantic narrative, and the Marxian narrative.

The Englightenment narrative is the one that says we are moving from the dark night of superstition to a new world of reason and science. That human society is progressing from ignorant ways of social organization based on tradition and divination towards a rational society based on science and rational discussion. This society will be led by a rational, educated elite that runs the government and sets the parameters of social development from above.

The Romantic narrative is a reaction against the Enlightenment narrative. It looks upon the world as more of an unfathomable mystery, working in a mysterious way. It honors the hidden paths of nature and it looks to sensitive, creative people to intuit the essence of the world and to replace the artificial and the superficial with an authentic humanity that is in tune with the life principle. This society will be led by a sensitive, creative elite that can develop in themselves an authentic response to the experience of being thrown into the world.

The Marxian or revolutionary narrative says that we are in a new phase of the age old conflict between the powerful and the people. In the old days, the contest was between the aristocrats and the peasants. Now, with the rise of the middle class, the contest is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Just as the peasants were inevitably ground into dust in the agricultural age, so the proletarians are being inevitably immiserated into poverty by the triumph of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. But this will lead to revolution and the salvation of humanity in a world of sharing and caring. This society will be led by a revolutionary elite that knows the meaning of history and represents the will of the oppressed.

Shouldered aside by these bold visions has been another narrative. It is the narrative of democratic capitalism. In this narrative we have recently made the transformation from an agricultural age, based on the power of warrior landowners, to an industrial age, based on the power of the market, producers and consumers, to negotiate their needs through productive enterprises, finance, and law. This society is a self-discovery process, as people great and small engage with the market to discover and fulfill other peoples' needs and thereby to satisfy their own needs. They form social structures as they go, augmenting the foundational group of the family with voluntary associational groups that operate by cooperation and competition rather than by the brute force of government power or religious inspiration.

The purpose of the new conservative movement of the last 50 years is to discredit the three narratives that have so dominated the last two hundred years and establish a new order in which reason, creativity, and conflict will be moderated by a Greater Separation of Powers that limits the power of reason, of creativity, and of conflict to reach strategic concentration and totalitarian power.

And that will be something.

Liberals! Don't Push Yourselves Off the Cliff!

Conservatives and Republicans, whatever our faults, can point to two decisive domestic policies of the last 30 years that really made a difference. The first was supply-side economics. The second was "broken-window" policing. The first policy ushered in the Reagan Revolution and ignited a twenty year economic boom from 1980 to 2000. The second made New York City livable and cut the murder rates in the Big Apple by over 50 percent.

But liberals seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past. No doubt that is why Republicans are surging to political power everywhere in America except the two left coasts. Here is a lifeline to my liberal friends before they push themselves off the cliff.

Supply-side economics is why Bill Clinton ran as a "new" Democrat to split the difference between the Sixties Left and the Reagan Right. When he betrayed his promise and raised taxes and pushed HillaryCare he got himself a Republican Congress in the 1994 midterms. In 1996 he passed welfare reform in order to win reelection and prove he'd learned his lesson.

"Broken-window" policing was an idea advanced by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982. It was implemented in Boston and New York by Bill Bratton, famously while Rudy Guiliani was mayor of New York City in the 1990s. The idea was to pin-point high crime areas and harass young men that committed minor crimes of vandalism, thus sending a message to the street that disorder would not be tolerated. It was a counter-strategy to the "police brutality" politics of the Sixties and 1970s; police had responded by retreating from the streets and career trouble, and letting crime rage unabated.

If liberals were smart and if they truly believed in science they would have read, learned, and inwardly digested the theory and the evidence. But they didn't, and you can see that by reading the Wikipedia links above. They equivocate; they dance and jive. So if you are a genuine NPR/NYT liberal you don't pay no nevermind to the lessons of supply-side economics and broken-window policing.

But there is a penalty for ignoring reality; you get punched upside the head. The Clinton generation of Dem politicians knew that they had to pay their respects to supply-side economics and pretend they supported the cops even if they didn't believe a word of it. They had to pretend because the "stupid" voters believed it. But then a generation of liberals grew up that knew not Reagan. Call it the Vox generation, after young Ezra Klein's website. They went to college and got their economics straight from Keynes and their politics straight from the left, and so they never got taught that Keynes and cop-baiting was poison for Democrats, quite apart from the fact that they were poison for the economy and for society.

So let's rehearse for our lefty friends why they must take their supply-side and broken-windows medicine if they want to resume the aborted drive for a new Democratic majority. Look, I get that leftist politics is all about benefits and justice for the poor. But you don't get to do it unless you have the economy working and the streets safe.

So let's do the elevator story on economics that every liberal should know.

Supply-side economics The basic thing to grasp is that Keynesian economics is like a relief pitcher for government. It's a get-out-of-a-jam dodge. It says, in the middle of a financial crisis: oh gosh, we can't reduce government benefits while people are unemployed; we can't let our favored corporate friends go bankrupt. So we must keep spending and we must print money. Unfortunately that doesn't get the economy back on track. Supply-side economics says: yes, you must bail out the banks to prevent a credit collapse, but then it's back to hard money. Yes, you don't want the unemployed rioting in the streets, but the way to stimulate the economy is by cleaning out crony subsidies and regulations and taxes and lowering the marginal tax rates on work and investing.

Here's the elevator story on broken-windows policing that every liberal should know.

Broken-windows policing The basic problem of every city since the Industrial Revolution is that you get a strategic concentration of young lower-class males with few skills that tend towards the instincts of all young men down the ages: the dawn raid. Starting in the 1830s with the London Metropolitan Police the response of the middle class to the criminal gang activity of young lower-class urban males has been vigorous policing. The job of British "bobbies" and America "cops" has been to get in the faces of the young thugs and say, like Dirty Harry, Go ahead, make my day. When the cops do this the young thugs retreat and the city becomes safe. When they don't, as in New York City in the 1970s, the young thugs rampage around and make life hell for the poor.

Let us turn to Karl Marx and my copy of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He begins:

Hegel says somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

He means, I assume, that if we don't learn our lesson the first time around, we will be forced to learn it the second time, only this time in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

Supply-side economics was a response to the tragedy of economic "stagflation" in the 1970s. The Keynesians said that they had figured out the business cycle and how to avoid economic reverses. The 1970s proved them wrong, and supply-side economics proved that there was another way, and it worked.

Broken-windows policing was a response to the anti-police politics of the Marcuse Left in the 1960s and the crime wave that followed in the 1970s. It said that, whatever the "root cause" of poverty, there is no alternative to aggressive policing right in the faces of the young lower-class thugs. When implemented in Boston, in New York, in Los Angeles, broken-windows policing worked.

So come on liberals. Stop the madness while you still can. Go with the settled science and stop being deniers about supply-side economics and broken-windows policing.

Freeloaders, Freebooters, Work and Freedom

According to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, "Nothing is more corrosive to a group's cohesion than free riders." He is talking about the freeloaders that show up when the goodies are being handed out but are mysteriously absent when there is work to be done.

So all we need to do it to get the government to put the shirkers to work.

Would that were all it took. The problem is that every government relies on a group of freeloaders to serve as its supporters. They could be the temple priests of early Mesopotamian civilization. They could be the great land barons of high feudalism. They could be the patronage appointees of 19th century governments in the US. And every government relies on the soldiers that, while eating their heads off most of the time, are the men that stand ready to defend the borders against the enemy.

Today, of course, the freeloaders are the beneficiaries of government entitlement programs and corporate subsidies. Don't ever mess with their benefits, Mr. Politician, or you'll find yourself defeated at the next election.

In fact every government must keep its supporters happy; otherwise it is not long for this world. So governments are willing to bankrupt the territory they govern rather than cut back on the benefits going to their supporters.

Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer has an interesting view of this question. In "The Readiness to Work," an essay in The Ordeal of Change, he observes that down the ages work has traditionally been sneered at. It was "viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage, or, at best, a necessary evil." But not in the modern Occident. In the west, the assumption is that people want to work, and the government is not long for this world that fails to provide job opportunities for all that desire them.

In fact, Hoffer writes, a society has two choices. It can deputize the government to set people to work; that is the age-old solution. Or it can deputize the people to find work for themselves; that is the modern approach. Either solution is a heavy burden. In the subordination of a top-down society the worker is stigmatized with the "mark of bondage;" in the freedom of the individualist society the worker is burdened with the responsibility "to prove his worth," and that means, for the average man or woman without exceptional "capacities and talents," merely "keeping busy."

You can see the problem with government. The more that it delivers benefits to its supporters the more it must compel the people to work, for someone must create the wealth that the government distributes to its supporters. We know the end point of this philosophy; it is the 20th century totalitarian state, where everyone is a beneficiary of social justice and everyone is a slave that is put to work under the command of the overseers. The problem with this system is illuminated by the Soviet era Russian joke: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us!"

If government leads to the dead end of universal freeloading and slavery, then, as Lenin said, "What is to be done?"

The answer is: religion. People have to believe in giving rather than receiving; they have to fear divine judgement for their sins. They must be filled with a faith in themselves as individually responsible to their families, their society, their God for their lives.

Government can't do this, for the difference between a robber band and a government is, as St. Augustine wrote, the addition of impunity. Corporations can't do it, because they are strategic actors in pursuit of profit. What it takes is something similar to the "Protestant Ethic" that Max Weber discovered in the "Spirit of Capitalism."

We are talking about a moral/cultural thing that infuses the culture, that sets the taken-for-granted rules by which politicians canvass for votes and CEOs advertise for customers.

That's why people like me say that we need a Greater Separation of Powers to keep the moralists and the politicians from getting together, as in socialism and "progressivism," and the politicians and the capitalists from getting together, as in crony capitalism.

It probably means that we all agree, by faith, that we must and will care for the poor ourselves, individually, and not deputize the responsibility to government.

And as to what would happen if the moralists and the capitalists ever got together, we can only shudder.